Letters might be the building blocks of language, but without learning about phonemes, how will your students know when to take a bow or tie a bow? Though mostly an auditory skill, teaching phonemic awareness in kindergarten is important for reading and writing too. It helps them to recognize and spell many words simply by sounding them out.
It can be strange for us adults, who use our phonemic awareness skills unconsciously every day, to slow down and focus on pronouncing one sound in one word at a time. However, finding creative ways to break familiar words down into their individual phonemes is key to your students’ success. The following strategies for teaching phonemic awareness to your kindergarteners help pave the path to literacy by keeping your lesson plans effective and engaging.
Strategy #1: Do Your Own Homework
It may feel a bit silly to sound out “How now, brown cow?” to yourself at home or in an empty classroom, but practicing a phonemic awareness lesson ahead of time can help. For single-letter phonemes, for example, it’s all too tempting to name the letter instead of pronouncing the sound—a simple error, but one which can be quite confusing for youngsters still learning the difference. Practicing on your own ahead of time refreshes both the lesson and the sounds in your mind so that, by the time the first bell rings, you’ll be more than ready to guide your students through their phonemic exercises for the day.
Strategy #2: Engage in Wordplay
Especially for kindergarten students, the key to motivating your students to learn is to keep the lesson light and fun. It’s called “wordplay,” after all—not “wordwork”! Teaching phonemic awareness through drills and memorization work is as dull for your students as it is for you. Instead, try asking your students to come up with some silly alliterative sentences or practice pronouncing a few crazy tongue-twisters. Learning is better with a little laughter sprinkled in for good measure.
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Strategy #3: Read Playful Books
Another excellent strategy for teaching phonemic awareness involves reading a good book or two. Books that rhyme or focus on specific types of figurative language, such as alliteration or assonance, are particularly useful for this exercise, as they help your students draw connections between similar phonemes and reinforce the ones they’ve already learned. And of course, kids love a good story. Classics like the works of Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein are often used in phonemic exercises. Some of my personal favorites also include books like All about Arthur (an Absolutely Absurd Ape) by Eric Carle, How Do Dinosaurs Go To School? by Jane Yolen and Four Fur Feet by Margaret Wise Brown.
Strategy #4: Practice it in Writing
Though the majority of your students’ phonemic awareness exercises will likely involve practicing out loud, it’s important to guide them to use what they’ve learned in writing, too. Be sure to start small, focusing first on simple identification activities before moving on to practicing writing and reading their own sentences aloud.
One tactic I’ve always found especially useful is to incorporate phonemic awareness activities into a larger writing and publishing lesson plan. Once they’ve begun to master basic phonemes, guide them through the process of developing and publishing their very own rhyming or tongue-twisting classbook that will show off their new skills as well as become a fantastic tool for reviewing what they’ve learned.
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Ms. Rodriguez’s class illustrates this particular strategy for teaching phonemic awareness brilliantly with their classbook, Kindergarten, Kindergarten, What Do You See? Adapted from the beloved Bill Martin, Jr. and Eric Carle book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, these students used the basic format of the original to practice using phonemic awareness to write their own rhyming sentences. They provided their own illustrations and even turned each other into characters in their own story to write and publish a classbook that is as delightful to look at as it must have been to create.
Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Making Phonemes Fun
Phonemes and fun, despite sharing a phoneme between them, might not seem to go together. These phonemic awareness teaching strategies, however, prove otherwise. By practicing your own phonemes as well as helping your students practice theirs through wordplay, reading phoneme-friendly books and even writing and publishing a book of their own, you can guide your students to become masters of letters and phonemes alike. Next stop, conjunction junction!
For more fun reading and writing activities for your kindergarten students, check out our online teacher’s lounge and sign up for your free publishing kit!
Image sources: Lead image via Shutterstock; Images 1, 2, 3, 4 via OpenClipart.org